German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.
81st Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.
Wiesbaden,
12.-16.05.2010.
DÃ¼sseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2010. Doc10hno054

Outline

Introduction: For about 25 years the cochlear implant (CI) has been proven to be the routine method of choice for audiological rehabilitation of deaf patients. Recently there are considerations to limit this procedure due to its supposed complexity to a few centers.

Results: Overall 79 patients were provided with a CI between 2003 and 2010. In 13 cases a bilateral implantation was performed resulting in 92 surgeries in total. Our younges patient was one year old, the oldest was 88 with an average age of 61 years (Figure 1 [Fig.Â 1]). To our knowledge all patients use their implant every day and are very satisfied by the improvement of their audiological abilities. There were 3 patients with a chronic otitis media who afforded a staged procedure: in a first step we obliterated the middle ear cleft and the external auditory meatus with abdominal wall fat after a subtotal petrosectomy. After 6 months the implantation could be performed without difficulties. There were no infections or facial paresis in our patients. However we could correct a malinsertion of the electrode array in a female patient with a inner ear dysplasia succesfully. The overall speech understanding is about 73% in HSM postoperatively to 2% prepoperatively and 63% monosyllables respectively 2% without CI. The feed back of the patients is utmost positive (Figure 2 [Fig.Â 2]).

Conclusions: Our experiences show the possibility of a successfull and high quality patient care with CI even by a non-university center. Especially the older patients benefit from the individual care near to their living area. We think that it is not reasonable to limit the routine CI-procedure to centres which could hardly be reached by especially older people in a rural area.